Your nasty missive disguised as an editorial about the county's emergency shelter for families at the Hidden Cove Motel in Hampton Bays overflows with fiction, distortions and revision of history, but not to worry.

With Hidden Cove (HC), one thing counts far more than your misstatement, misplaced anger and misreporting; more than the neoliberal town supervisor's fabrications. And by the way, more than once, even publicly, DSS offered to work with the town to move this shelter to an acceptable location, and never did the supervisor or anyone else reply.

Your silly reasoning of why I retired after 36 years in public life deserves no answer.

All that, however, is background noise. By the time HC closes later this year, close to 400 desperate families will have been served there, most with pre-school aged kids.

They are on their way to, or often back to, the middle class, whose cause you oddly insist has been threatened by the shelter's very existence.

In fact, the HC shelter, in all respects, is a true humanitarian achievement. It came about not only by county DSS and its able professionals in CHI, but also the community of Hampton Bays, the county taxpayers, the school district property owners (your million $ figure of the cost to the school district of the children placed at the shelter is grossly overstated, as were other figures cited) and the state of NY. There was a lot to juggle, and it worked!

Now a revised, updated approach for family sheltering by the county is being implemented. As a result, outlying, small and medium-sized emergency shelters will decrease in number.

Still, the awesome challenge of sheltering Long Island's homeless persists. And for its part, the saga of Hidden Cove proves to have been most positive and instructive.

GREG BLASS

Editor's Note: Yes it was particularly "positive" to the landlord who raked in almost 30 grand a month in taxpayers' money for that dump, and to the management company, CHI, that is paid millions of dollars each year by the county to play "warden" at these facilities. You still don't get it – the Southampton town supervisor balked at housing these DSS recipients because they didn't come from Southampton. In fact, many were not even from Suffolk, the state, and some weren't even from this country! They came to get public assistance, which you so blithely provided to all comers. And guess who gets stuck with the tab?

Token Raids

Dear Editor,

If anyone thinks highly publicized raids on a few 7-Eleven stores means Team Obama is now serious about enforcing federal immigration law, read on.

Federal authorities did not care that local convenience store owners hired illegal immigrants. ICE could raid local employers suspected of hiring illegals every day of the week, without tipping off the media in advance.

So what brought Federal attention to our area? Identity theft by convenience store owners (they provided Social Security numbers to their illegal workers) and a Federal government desperate to give the appearance of enforcement.

In the big picture, the token 7-Eleven raids were meaningless window dressing.

Media reports describe the fifty illegal immigrants arrested as "victims," but who are we kidding? The Pakistani nationals knew they had no right to work here, and they gladly took part in document fraud and identity theft to make illegal dollars.

Don't expect any of the illegal employees to be deported, because the Feds will let them remain here to testify at a trial that may take place two, three or four years from now.

Is there any good news to come out of the 7-Eleven Photo Op enforcement? Yes! Now, all of us know that ICE does indeed have Agents and vehicles they can dispatch to our area.

When will your office demand that ICE Agents assigned to our area cooperate with our local police 24/7?

Mr. Bishop, it may shock you, but illegal immigrants in your district cause a disproportionate number of drunk driving crashes. In case you've forgotten, we remind you ---and ICE--- that Carlos Armando Ixpec-Chitay, the Southampton illegal alien suspected of killing Sister Jacqueline Walsh, is still at large one year after her tragic death.

Photo Op enforcement is a bad joke, and we see through it.

The only solution is steady enforcement. Crack down on employers. No taxpayer benefits for illegals. Arrest and deport criminal aliens, and above all, NO Amnesty.

ELAINE KAHL

Hypocrisy At Smithfield

Dear Editor,

Smithfield Foods has fired Paula Deen over her use of a racial epithet because it claims that it's "determined to be an ethical food industry leader," yet the world's largest killer of pigs is on the brink of being purchased by a Chinese company that was caught feeding pigs a drug that can sicken humans who ingest meat tainted with it. Smithfield itself has flip-flopped on its promise to phase out gestation crates — which are so small that pregnant pigs can't turn around or even take a single step in any direction — and it will require only company-owned farms to act, not contract farms.

In 2007, PETA documented that workers at a Smithfield supplier dragged injured pigs by their snouts, ears, and legs before killing them with a captive-bolt gun. Workers also cut off piglets' tails and pulled out their testicles as the youngsters screamed in pain.

Smithfield claims that it "condemns the use of offensive and discriminatory language and behavior of any kind," yet according to a New York Times article about a Smithfield slaughterhouse in North Carolina, employees were overheard using racist slurs, and the reporter noted that blacks and Hispanics got "the dirty jobs at the factory."

An African-American woman standing in line recently at Deen's Savannah restaurant said forgivingly, "She's just from another time." This is true, and so are Smithfield's cruel and unhealthy products, and it's time for them to be consigned to the history books like segregated lunch counters.